Spher App: For A Better Womorrow

Imagine that someone you know decided to enrol at a business school – what do they want out of it? To build a multinational company? To attain a managerial role in their current company? To network with some of the top business people in the world?

For entrepreneur Jitte Sjösäter, it was none of the above. Rather, it was just a step to follow his moral compass.

Jitte Sjösäter (C.E.O)

“I have always felt that I have my own moral compass inside of me. Whenever someone is going against it, I speak up. As a kid, I was the one taking the fight against what I perceived as injustices in the classroom. My teachers told me to harness this passion and channel it to something good when I got older.”

But the catalyst for Jitte’s passion project came from a personal tragic event just shy of one year and a half ago, where one of his friends was a target of some abusive men. Following a night out with friends, she decided to leave and walk the short distance home alone. Unfortunately, she never made it home... After this fateful event, Jitte realised just how different walking down a street can be just based on your gender identity. 

“That did not play well with my compass, and I set out to even the grounds to create safer streets, which means a safer life, which means a better Womxn tomorrow, which we at Spher call a better Womorrow.”

And so, Spher was created.

What’s important is that while on the surface it looks like it’s just an app for womxn, Spher is way more than that. For Jitte, it’s just as important that men are involved. 

Marcus Winding (C.T.O)

“Most men have either a friend, girlfriend, sister, mother or aunt who is a womxn. If they care for any of them, safety is a problem that should concern them as much as it concerns the womxn themselves. We could dig deeper and talk about masculinity and when it becomes toxic, but this toxic masculinity is also very damaging for many boys/men.”

So to Jitte, the concept of a Womorrow is not just for womxn, but for men as well. 

“If we could help every womxn to have a better tomorrow, we are also helping all the men who are associated with these womxn, to have a better tomorrow,” he said.

And this desire to be as inclusive as possible extends beyond gender. Spher also aims to include its users as much as possible, and this started right from the beginning. 

“We started off with an extensive survey and followed up with interviews. After that, we took in ambassadors who could act as our jury and judge. On top of that, we sent out new surveys to see that we are on the right track still. In the future, we are planning to hold monthly live shows where the users can interact with us as well as vote on different updates to the app.” 

When asked about the ambassadors, Jitte held a very high regard for all of them, describing that, “while they are so very different, they have a common denominator in that all of them have a strong passion to create a better Womorrow.”

Marcia Fernandes (C.P.O)

Just like how Spher includes all genders and its users, it’s also committed to including diverse ambassadors. 

“We have people from basically all ethnicities, backgrounds and even parts of the world. We have a man from Peru, a womxn from Australia and another one from the Carribean. They do everything from translating the content into their native languages to inspire me and the other founders with new ideas to cracking code. So even in their tasks, they are super diverse.”

This is why it comes as no surprise that Jitte has learned a lot in the process so far.

“The greatest thing I have learned is to never judge a book by its cover. When you are in business school, you are basically taught to hire people with a degree in business. But what I have seen thus far is that passion beats experience every day of the week. 

Some of the ambassadors have never sat one foot at a business school, yet they showcase amazing abilities when it comes to building businesses. I think it springs from the fact that all of them agree with and can identify with our mission to a great extent. This has made me look over the whole recruitment scheme, away from CVs and instead base it on more soft values”

While the App itself is still in its infancy, because “every startup book tells you to launch before you are ready, otherwise, you will never launch,” it has some of the most fundamental features of a safety app already. 

“What you will see in the first version is a heavy focus on A-B-A security. Basically, from the moment you leave your house until you're back again. As a user, you will be able to create a safety Sphere where you can notify your friends and loved ones where you are and they will be able to trace you. If anything happens, you will be able to send an SOS signal to them so they can take action. On top of that, you can stay connected via a chat.”

Although the first version is more to do with womxn’s safety, Spher wants its community to know that it’s much more than that, because it wants to include its users at every step of the project. An idea that has been tossed around is to include a user-generated safety feature, meaning that you can notify all the womxn in your close proximity if something happens to you, so they can take direct action. The Spher team also has the idea to create a function allowing users to mark streets as “Unsafe” due to predetermined criteria such as lack of light. 

A sneak peak of what the app looks like

“But the future's not ours to decide. It’s the users who decide it. We merely execute their wishes,” Jitte says.

If you are wondering how you can best support Spher, Jitte says to “talk about us, talk to your family, your friends, your enemies, and that random lady you meet on your way home. The more people who use us, the stronger our movement gets!”

You can become a part of the Spher community by following them on Instagram or subscribing to their updates.

WORDS: JESSIE WANG, JITTE SJÖSÄTER
PHOTOGRAPHY: SPHER APP